This is a heckuva way to run a Church, but on the other hand . . .

Posted on by
8
Nero’s Bathtub at the Vatican

Why do Catholics still worship an old king in a palace?

I understand why they did in the old days. Everybody did. (Well, except Christ didn’t.) There was Henry VIII, Louis XIV, Charlemagne and, in folklore, King Arthur. There were also king-like rulers called emperors, such as Julius Caesar, Peter the Great, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

It was way back in the olden days that Catholics set up the papacy, their kingship. Their first Pope was said to be the Apostle named Peter, who used to be called Simon.

By the way, the names of the Apostles always have confused me. There was Paul, who was really Saul. There was Mark, who sometimes went by John. There was John, who always went by John even though Mark sometimes did, too. There was the aforementioned Simon whom Jesus called Peter even though that wasn’t his name and there was another Simon whom Jesus called Simon even though that was his name.

There were two James’s. One was James the Greater about whom we know a great deal of apocrypha and the other was James the Lesser about whom we know much less. James the Lesser went by Jim. (OK, that part is made up.)

Jesus must have had the patience of Job, considering how many times he had to say “No, the other one.”

As if Apostles are not complicated enough, let’s get back to popes. In case you encounter a pope, the proper form of address is not “Your Majesty.” That’s for kings and queens. Popes get addressed instead as “Your Holiness.” You see, kings and queens may be majestic, but popes are holy.

In fact, papal pronouncements on matters of Church doctrine are said to be “infallible.” Never mind that Church doctrine changes from time to time. The old doctrine was infallible when it was in effect, and the new, different one is infallible when it’s in effect.

As for all things, for infallibility there’s a season.

So, popes are holy. But there’s a bit of majesty in them, too. For a long time, infallible popes were also effectively the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, an area that stretched from Rome to the Baltic Sea.

Wars and intrigue gradually chipped away at the Empire. The establishment of the nation of Italy in the 1800s cost the Vatican almost all of the little land they still held. The earthly territory of the Holy Roman Empire now comprises 0.2 square miles within the city limits of downtown Rome.

But that 0.2 square miles holds some good stuff, such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, priceless art works, and St Peter’s Basilica.

And Nero’s Bathtub. Nero’s Bathtub is a massive bathtub about 25’ long made of stone quarried in Egypt and brought to Rome for Emperor Nero. What better place to fiddle through a fire than in a bathtub? The value of Nero’s Bathtub is estimated at around two billion dollars. That’s $2,000,000,000. (I’m not making this part up.)

Altogether, the Vatican is the most valuable 0.2 square miles this side of Heaven. Don’t ask how they acquired all this treasure, and don’t ask how to reconcile such material acquisitiveness with their incorporeal mission. We’re talking infallible, remember?

These material riches of the Vatican’s balance sheet are oddly juxtaposed with the sorry condition of its income statement. They’re rich but they spend far more than they make. In fact, their finances have been in bad shape for many years. They have fallible finances.

In their defense, back in those olden days they had a lot of expenses such as wars to fight and bribes to pay. But now they don’t fight earthly wars, and bribes have not been reported for years. Even so, well into modern times they’ve still had sloppy finances, money-laundering allegations, and what might be called, um, corruption.

During the tenure of newly departed Pope Francis, the Vatican’s operating deficit tripled. Maybe ballooning budgets come with the territory from which he originated – Argentina.

Whatever the reason, finance types warn that this Latin American spendathon cannot continue unless the Vatican sells off assets, which will fix finances only for a while, or resumes selling indulgences – to a flock that is no longer accustomed to having to pay for them.

In contrast to the papacy, the aforementioned kingships and empires of Europe have evolved. They’ve been replaced by indirectly elected technocrat parliamentarians in such countries as Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy and most everywhere else. Only the throne of Peter the Great is still occupied by a despot.

So, what’s with the black smoke/white smoke ritual (“smoke-filled room” takes on a new meaning here) by a politburo of old men that are attired in plush red robes and lamp shade hats (let’s trust they’re not chomping cigars) to choose a new, infallible, male, old, dear leader in the richest corner of the globe even as that corner – and the globe – drift inexorably toward bankruptcy?

This is a heckuva way to save souls.

On the other hand . . .

The Catholic Church has probably been the greatest force for good in the history of the world. It has brought Good News to billions of people to enrich their lives if not save their souls.

The lucre and treasures the Church acquired along the way were from a different era, when that’s what powerful people did. It’s difficult for them to give it all away now, just because some Protestant blogger mocks Nero’s Bathtub.

And to whom would they give it? Secularist governments?

Sheesh, after the Notre Dame burned, the secular government of France proposed replacing it with a temple that would not offend (i.e., would pander to) the burgeoning Muslim population that seeks control of Europe. They backed down only when the remaining Catholic population of Paris (and France and the world) made a fuss.

My brother, a very smart guy with a Ph.D. in Physics, was a convert to Catholicism. I never really talked with him about his faith, but I respected his judgment. In that way, he reminds me of another very smart convert, JD Vance.

I confess that on my two long walks of the Camino de Santiago, there were times when I, too, considered converting to Catholicism. (There have been times when I’ve also thought about converting to Judaism, but that’s another column.) For now, I’m a die-hard Protestant.

So, the Church on balance has been a very good thing over the millennia.

Still, it has its quirks.

The Wall Street Journal debases itself in a misleading Trump headline

Posted on by
5

I’ve read the Wall Street Journal for many years. I’ve even had a piece published in the Journal. The opinion page is excellent (even when I disagree with the opinions expressed there) and the news page is reliable (though it has drifted leftward over the years).

I was therefore surprised and disappointed to see the Journal’s coverage of a recent interview that President Trump gave to NBC News.

Trump was asked about the due process protections he should afford illegal aliens being deported. Here’s the transcript of the relevant part, as presented by NBC News itself:

“But even given those numbers [of illegals] that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” Welker asked.

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

A fair reading of that exchange is: (1) the interviewer asked Trump whether he would uphold the Constitution in connection with his deportation of illegals, (2) he replied that he’s not a lawyer, so he doesn’t know what the legal requirements are, (3) he has many brilliant lawyers who will tell him, and (4) they’ll “obviously follow what the Supreme Court” says.

The Journal presented the clip, but accompanied it with a very misleading headline. The headline read,

“Asked if He Has to Uphold the Constitution, Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’”

That headline was misleading in at least three ways. First, it leaves out the context, thereby implying a context much broader.

The question asked of Trump was not the general question of whether he “has to uphold the Constitution.” Rather, it was a very specific question: It was whether Trump has to afford due process protections to illegals being deported.

Second, the headline omits the rest of Trump’s answer. He immediately went on to note in connection with this Constitutional issue that he is not a lawyer.

That’s not just a quibble. Even most lawyers would struggle to define the necessary due process protections for illegals. Do they get a full-blown jury trial? Do they get summary adjudication by an administrative judge? Do they get something in-between? Even the Supreme Court has not been crystal clear on this point.

Third, Trump wound up his answer by explicitly stating that he would defer to whatever the Supreme Court says.

In context, it’s hard to see what Trump said wrong. He did indeed start his answer with “I don’t know” but immediately explained why he didn’t know, and gave assurance that he would do as told by people who do know — namely, the Supreme Court.

The Journal’s headline parrots a similar headline from the outlet that did the interview, NBC News. I was not surprised to see NBC sink this low to rake up muck, but I was indeed surprised to see the Journal follow them down there.

Glenn Beaton practiced law in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

Put this on your bucket list: open heart surgery

Posted on by
11

“I can hardly wait to see your nine-incher, Glenn!” Those were the words of a dear hiking buddy with whom I’ve had a long platonic friendship.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Beginning last summer, I felt less than my usual acerbic, aerobic self, especially when hiking at altitude with my group around Aspen. I finally awoke one morning feeling downright crappy, and a little light-headed. I’m not prone to illness. I haven’t vomited for at least 30 years, and my last cold was over ten years ago. I figured something was wrong.

I drove myself to the local emergency room. Cleverly, or so I thought, I skipped breakfast because I figured they’d want to draw blood for tests.

They did draw blood, and did lots of imaging. They found nothing wrong.

Except I passed out. That alarmed me and everyone else until we figured out it was due to plummeting glucose levels. That’s what happens in early afternoon if you haven’t eaten a thing for 20 hours. So much for my cleverness in skipping breakfast.

Over the next two months, I became a regular in the ER and in the medical offices. Each time was with the same symptoms: Intense fatigue, light-headedness, and now some cognitive and memory issues. Each time, they found nothing wrong.

They did notice my bicuspid aortic valve – a defect that I was born with and have been aware of for many years. The aortic valve is the exit from the heart to the aortic artery. All the blood pumped to your body goes through it. It’s supposed to be three-leafed, but about one percent of the population gets short-changed in the aortic valve line at birth and gets only a two-leafed version.

A bicuspid aortic valve is usually not fatal. Many people never realize they have it. But it’s not as efficient, and it can deteriorate over time.

They saw my bicuspid aortic valve through a routine echocardiogram. They apply an echo transducer to the chest, something like the transducers applied to a woman’s belly to generate an image of a baby in the womb.

The echocardiogram showed that I had “mild regurgitation” through my bicuspid aortic valve, and would need to have it replaced sometime in the next few years. But it was not an emergency and did not account for my symptoms.

I was starting to think my symptoms were imagined, and the docs probably were too.

Almost on a lark, I saw yet another cardiologist. This one was suspicious about the echocardiogram images showing only mild regurgitation at my defective aortic valve. He ordered up a different sort of echocardiogram. For this one, they put me under an anesthetic and put the transducer down my trachea to get a view of the valve from a different angle.  

That angle showed the regurgitation at the bicuspid aortic valve was not mild, but “severe.” The valve had deteriorated to the point that blood was backflowing from the aorta back into the heart. They checked me into the hospital that very day and performed open heart surgery to replace the valve as soon as they could round up a surgical team.

The lead surgeon happened to be a petite blond woman. Her blondness was of no consequence, medically speaking, but I noticed her small, strong fingers that would soon be fishing around in my chest. I thought, “That makes sense – all surgeons should be petite women.”

For the replacement valve, they can use a mechanical prosthesis or a biological one. We chose the biological one. It’s fabricated from natural bovine heart tissue. So, I have a bit of Bessy in me. At least it wasn’t porcine tissue.

Surgery entails a nine-inch incision lengthwise over the sternum (hence the remark by my friend which I quoted above). Then they cut through the sternum, still lengthwise, and pry open the split sternum and chest cavity with a steel prying cage that looks like something from a tire store.

That exposes the beating heart. A vein and an artery are accessed with catheters connected to a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain the oxygenation of the blood. The heart is then stopped with drugs, and remains stopped for an hour or two during the next steps.

The surgeon cuts into the heart to expose the aortic valve, carves it out, takes measurements, and sews in the prosthetic valve of the right size. Then the heart is closed with stiches, the bypass machine is disconnected from its arterial and venous access points, the heart is restarted, the prying cage is closed and removed, the sternum is stapled or wired together, and the skin incision is stitched up. The whole operation usually takes 4-6 hours.

I once had simple knee surgery where they used an epidural to numb me from the hip down. I elected to stay conscious the whole time and observed the surgery on a video monitor.

That was not an option for the heart surgery.

I awoke that evening with a tube down my throat. My first assigned task was to convince them that I was well enough for them to remove it. I succeeded, and they did.

I spent another four nights in the hospital. With encouragement, I was able to walk to the bathroom right away, and each day I walked a bit farther down the hallway. By the last day, I was walking a single flight of the stairwell. It wasn’t exactly the Matterhorn, but you have to start somewhere.

At home, it was tricky to get around without feeling pain in the sternum and thereabouts. After about three months, the direct pain was pretty much gone, except there would be odd bouts of intense pain or cramps in the intercostals between the ribs.

Heart arrhythmias are common after open heart surgery because the surgical incisions cut through established electrical pathways. The body finds alternative pathways that are incorrect and mistimed.

I got the full measure of arrhythmias. Atrial fibrillation was first, where the heart races and flutters. My heart rate would be 64, then 42, then 163, then 81, all in the span of a few seconds.

For that, I underwent the usual treatment of “cardioversion” where the patient is anaesthetized and the heart is shocked with a high-voltage current to reset the proper electrical synchronization. The burn marks left on the chest are usually small and heal quickly.

Then there were the premature ventricular contractions, or PVCs, where the sensation is that the heart is skipping a beat. All people get a few PVCs now and then, and they tend not to be dangerous, but mine would go on for hours or days. They were typically loud enough to keep me awake all night. Eventually, they subsided (I think).

The whole experience is disruptive to one’s metabolism, one’s head, and one’s emotions. I sincerely believe I’m a different person now.

That person is not yet as mentally acute. There’s a name for the symptom of brain fog after heart surgery involving a heart-lung bypass pump. They call it “pump head.” I confess to having a bit of pump head. It often improves over time.

I’m also not as aerobically strong. That, too, may improve – especially now that I have a proper and efficient aortic valve for the first time in my life. I’m not ready to hang up my hiking boots quite yet, or my spurs.

And I’m different in my personality. I’m relearning things, relearning people, and relearning myself. I choose to see it as a blessing. How many people get the chance to reinvent themselves, free of the baggage of who they were?

Meanwhile, I’ve got this nine-incher. Got that going for me.

Liberal judges to violent, criminal illegals: “You’re Trump’s enemy, so that makes you my friend”

Posted on by
5

Judges lately often exhibit acute cases of TDS. One in Milwaukee was preparing to preside over the trial of an illegal who’d been charged with domestic abuse. In layman’s language, he was charged with beating his girlfriend and others to the point that some required hospitalization. Federal agents showed up outside the judge’s courtroom with a warrant to arrest the man, presumably to deport him.

The judge stalled the agents for a bit by sending them down the hall, then returned to the courtroom. While the agents were away, she spirited the violent illegal out the side door.

The agents suspected a ruse, and went outside. They intercepted the man on the street, though it took a potentially dangerous rundown to catch him.

A judge in New Mexico was harboring three illegals who were apparently members of a notorious Venezuelan gang. The judge gave them guns. The judge also took a hammer to the phone belonging to one, evidently because it contained pictures of beheaded victims. He didn’t want the incriminating evidence to be discovered.

These acts by judges are not just intemperate and illustrative of bad, well, judgment. They’re also crimes. It’s a federal crime to conceal illegal immigrants. It’s a federal crime to interfere with the investigations of federal law enforcement officials. It’s a federal crime to lie to them. It’s a federal crime to destroy relevant evidence of a crime. The statutory punishment can involve decades in the federal penitentiary.

Ordinarily, these judges would not side with a wife-beater, or with a gang member with photos of his beheaded victims on his phone. Even judges who are Democrats are not that loony.

So why did the judges do so in these cases? Here’s my theory.

The reason the judges sided with criminals in these cases was because the person who was after them was Donald Trump.

These Democrat judges perceive Trump as their enemy (probably correctly) and they perceive these criminals as Trump’s enemy (certainly correctly) and so that makes the criminals their friend.

“My enemy’s enemy is my friend” is a crude and amoral way to pick friends, but I suppose people have the prerogative to use whatever criteria they like in such personal matters.

But judges sitting in their courtroom are not engaged in personal matters. They’re engaged in public matters. Their job is to judge, and they’ve sworn to do so in accordance with the law. They don’t have the luxury of putting the law aside in favor of personal prejudices such as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” If they did, then they could decide that criminals are innocent simply because they happen to dislike the prosecutor. Or guilty because they happen to like the prosecutor.

I’m from the old-fashioned school, and so are almost all other lawyers and almost all judges and almost all civilized legal systems. In that school, the guilt or innocence of a defendant is based on what he did, not who he’s a friend or enemy of.

These judges know that, and they would agree with it – in the abstract. If offered a hypothetical where the evidence shows the defendant is guilty but the prosecutor is someone the judge abhors, the judges would say that’s the way the cookie crumbles. The defendant would be convicted on the basis of the good evidence presented, not exonerated on the basis of the bad prosecutor presenting it.

But in these particular cases – the real-life ones in Milwaukee and New Mexico mentioned above – the judges have become prisoners to their emotions. Their hate for Trump is so strong that they literally cannot think straight.

The judge’s best defense to the charges against them for aiding the criminal illegals, therefore, is a plea of insanity. And I think that plea is a pretty good one.

They’re deranged, and I mean that in a clinical way. Donald Trump has a way of doing that to Democrats. This derangement is not helping them with voters.

Glenn Beaton practiced law in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

Hating on Jews is all the rage

Posted on by
8

Young people are slaves to fashion. (That’s one vice I’ve never been accused of, even when I was young.)

You name it – mustaches, bell-bottom jeans, Barack Obama, hula hoops, big hair, Burt Reynolds, electric cars, transexuals, solar panels, line-dancing to country music, etc., etc., etc.

Someday, there may be a fashion convergence on Netflix where we have a mustachioed Barack Obama, sporting big hair and bell-bottomed jeans, line-dancing to country music with a transexual Burt Reynolds playing with a hula hoop as they both get run over by a Tesla fired by a solar panel.

Meanwhile, we have antisemitism.

It’s all the rage. Ignorant college students chant “from the river to the sea” but can’t tell you the name of the river or the name of the sea.

These kids believe that Jews are racists for “occupying” the land between those two unnamable waters – for some 3,000 years. And so, they hate them and their Jewishness.

The reason they believe this is (1) because they’ve been told it’s true by the kids who are cool because their skin is dark and their foreign accent is strong, (2) because human nature is such that hate produces pleasurable endorphins, and (3) because it’s fashionable.

They still celebrate the torture and massacre of Jews on that horrible October 7, even as they caution (sometimes, but not usually) that it’s not the Jews they want massacred, but the Israelis. At the same time, they harass and persecute Jews on campus who have no attachment to Israel other than Jewishness.

Like most fashions that come around, this one has been around before. The first Jewish temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC. The second temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. The subsequent Jewish diaspora scattered thousands of Jews through Europe where they were persecuted for two millennia through soft bigotry and hard pogroms.

The discrimination reached an apex in a holocaust. Until the middle of the 20th century, that word meant “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale.” Now, the word is inseparable from an event of unspeakable horror, “The Holocaust.”

European bigotry immigrated to the Americas. As late as the 20th century, Harvard refused to admit Jews. Even now, they impose an informal limit on the number of Jewish admittees. Those who are admitted have been advised not to wear a visible Star of David, lest they trigger the Jew-haters.

When prestige schools occasionally protect the Jewish students, it is reluctantly and ambiguously. The leftists running these outfits smugly justify their tolerance for bigotry and even violence on the grounds of academic freedom. “Free to Hate” could well replace “Veritas” at Harvard.

As it has for thousands of years, Jewish merit overcomes much of this bigotry. Although Jews comprise only about 0.2% of the worldwide population and only about 1% of the American population, some 22% of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish.

But the soft discrimination continues in matters not governed objectively by merit. For example, Americans have never elected a President or Vice President who was Jewish. (To their credit, the Jews have not clamored for one. That’s not the way they roll.)

Antisemitism particularly burns in the Middle East. Jews have been essentially expelled from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – practically all of the Muslim countries of the Middle East. Jews are not so much discriminated against in those countries – they’re banned.

You might think that Israel has responded in kind, but they haven’t. Non-Jews exist side-by-side with Jews in Israel. In fact, about 21% of Israelis are Muslim.

It is this Jew-hating bigotry for which the young idiots on college campuses are useful. While they enjoy sunny springtime hijinks designed mainly to prove up their fashion consciousness in the college cocoon, Jews in the real world are actively discriminated against, threatened existentially, and occasionally raped, taken hostage, beheaded and murdered.

Fads pass and fashion is fleeting. If only this one were.

JD Vance would be a terrific President right now

Posted on by
1

He wasn’t exactly a product of “white privilege.” He was born an Irish-Scot in Appalachia to a woman who was an alcoholic and drug user. His parents divorced when he was a toddler. He was abused, neglected, and impoverished.

He was raised mainly by his grandparents. Against the odds, he survived childhood. He enlisted in the Marines right out of high school. He served in Iraq, and was medaled and promoted.

He came home to enroll in the local landmark, Ohio State University. He graduated with a dual major in Philosophy and Political Science.

From Ohio State, he enrolled in Yale Law School. If you think it’s easy to get into Yale Law School without being a DEI applicant, try it sometime.  (For the record, I don’t contend that you learn anything at Yale Law School, but it’s indisputable that it’s extremely difficult for a white male to get in.)

Let’s recap. This Scottish-Irish hillbilly went straight from Appalachia to a tour of duty as a Marine in Iraq, to a dual major in Political Science and Philosophy at Ohio State, to Yale Law School.

Along the way, he was publishing political stuff, and befriended billionaire conservative entrepreneur Peter Thiel.

Don’t ask me how he met Thiel and convinced him to give him the time of day. But I’m guessing it’s the same qualities that got him from Appalachia to Yale Law School.

I’d say he never looked back, except he did. At this point in his life, he started work on what became an inspirational best-seller about his early life, Hillbilly Elegy, which was later made into a great movie directed by Ron Howard. Rent it and watch it.

He was elected a U.S. Senator at age 38, and Vice President of the United States at age 40.

Ah, Vice President of the United States. That’s the recent waiting room of some men who later sat in the Oval Office, some good ones and some bad ones – Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush. (I don’t even count the old senile guy with a “doctor” wife to lead him around to collect payola for the family business while the world went to hell.)

So, is JD Vance of Presidential timber?

First, does he have the ambition? Well, yes. If he didn’t, he’d be in Kentucky driving a pickup truck of moonshine.

Is he smart? Yes. See, Yale Law School, above.

Does he take it personally if someone takes a position in opposition to his? Not as far as I can tell, but he’s likely to demolish that person’s position.  

Does he go around picking fights he cannot win just because he enjoys fighting and enjoys  the attention? No, I don’t think so. From what I’ve seen, he picks a fight because that particular fight is an important one and he knows he has a good chance of winning it.

Perhaps as a Marine in Iraq he learned an old saying of pilots in the Air Force: There are old ones and there are bold ones, but there are no old, bold ones.

Can he criticize a person’s position without name-calling? Yes, he can and he does. Calling people names is for people who are losing the argument.

Is he vague and unpredictable? Usually not. He may have learned something in the practice of law: Only be vague and unpredictable on purpose, never accidentally.

Does he tweet in ALL UPPER-CASE LETTERS as if he’s shouting at you? No, the little letters seem to get his point across just fine. He knows that, as in name-calling, shouting is for people who are losing the argument.

Does he have a beautiful wife who seems to genuinely love him? (Indulge me here. I like a First Lady to be firstly a lady.)

Yes, He appears to. They’ve been together since he was barely out of Appalachia.

I could go on, but you get the point. JD Vance is Presidential material.

Ah, you say, but maybe he’s unelectable.

Ah, says me, that’s the genius of this. See United States Constitution, Article II, Section 4 . . . Impeachment.  

To impeach Vance’s boss (whom I voted for three times), we would need the help of the Democrats. An impeachment conviction in the Senate requires 67 votes, and the Republicans have only 53.

Would the Democrats be so deranged as to vote to convict Vance’s boss in the Senate, and persuade a dozen and a half Republicans to join them there, thereby putting JD Vance into the Oval Office without ever being elected to it?

Yes. Recall what the “D” stands for in TDS.

“Abundance” is the left’s latest rebranding, but it all means the same

Posted on by
2

First, there were Marxists. The Marxists got a bad reputation for destroying economies. Seems the approach of taking from people in accordance with their ability to give, and giving to people in accordance with their ability to take, sounded nice but didn’t work well.

So, they rebranded to “communists,” as in community-ists. Everyone likes a community, right?

Same result, this time at the point of a gun. And murdering 100 million people in the “community” didn’t help their reputation.  

Then they rebranded to “socialists.” What’s not to like about being social?

The socialists didn’t pack guns, but did pack prison terms for people who refused to pay confiscatory taxes. People liked the prison terms about as much as they liked the point of a gun. 

Then they rebranded to “liberals.” That was shrewd, because it co-opted a word that meant the opposite of their Marxist, communist, socialist, censorious, confiscatory, murderous authoritarianism.

It took a while for the people to catch on, but they eventually did. The people came to realize that the “liberals” were anything but liberal in the true sense of that word.

Don’t even get me started on “woke.”

So, they rebranded to “progressives.” Sounds good – who could dislike progress? But it turned out that their idea of “progress” was to turn the clock back to nineteenth century Marxism, etc.

But this time they schemed to buy the votes of the few people who are oppressed – and the many who imagine they are – with “free stuff.” Free money in the form of free no-payback student loans, free health care, free or subsidized solar energy, free maternity/paternity/no-ternity leave, free vacations, free “working” from home, free federal government where the bottom 50% pay only 3% of federal income taxes, and free parking. (OK, that last one is made up.)

It worked no better that time around. Turns out, the “free stuff” was not actually free. It produced a multitrillion-dollar deficit and 9% inflation.

They deflected from the deficit and the inflation by suggesting that their opponents are racist. But people didn’t like being called racist any more than they liked the deficit, the inflation, the pointed guns, the confiscatory taxes, and the 100 million murders.

So, they lost another election. Big time.

Now they’re out of power. No White House, a minority in Congress and state legislatures and governorships, and they’re outnumbered 6-3 on the Supreme Court.

You might think they’d pause and reflect. Marxism/communism/socialism/liberalism/progressivism/free-stuff-that-ain’t-free might not be such a hot recipe for winning elections. Maybe they need a new idea or two?

Nah. Let’s just rebrand the free stuff, they say. Call it “abundance.” It’ll take people years to recognize that there’s no such thing as an abundant lunch any more than there’s such a thing as a free one.

Even then, they can be told that the abundant lunches provided for people who vote “correctly” are paid for by a tax on people who don’t. In other words, there may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there’s such a thing as lunch paid for by other people, and that’s almost as good. In fact, it’s better – because you get to punish the other guy for being more successful than you.

If that doesn’t work, they still have the race card. Maybe.

The fix is in to repeal Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights

Posted on by
7

Back in 1992, the citizens of Colorado passed an amendment to the state constitution to limit tax increases. They called it the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR.

TABOR did not eliminate taxes, nor did it prohibit tax increases. Instead, it merely limited tax increases to the rate of inflation plus the population growth of the state.

Even those limits can be exceeded by a mere majority of the voters of the jurisdiction seeking to exceed it. If the voters of Colorado want to raise the state income tax rate, for example, they can do so with a simple majority vote in the next election. Likewise, if the citizens of a municipality want to raise the city sales tax, they can do so by a simple majority vote in the next election.

The people of Colorado love TABOR. That’s true even now, when Colorado is a solid blue state with a Democrat governor, a Democrat majority in the state legislature, an all-Democrat state Supreme Court, and a population that voted for Kamala Harris by an 11-point margin.

But the Democrat establishment hates TABOR, and it’s not just because it has the dreaded “Bill of Rights” phrase in its name. They hate it because it accomplishes its objective – it limits tax increases that are not approved by the citizens being taxed. Democrats want taxes to go up far faster than inflation and population growth, and they want it to happen without the OK of the voters.

Democrats have tried to repeal TABOR, have tried to challenge TABOR in court, and have tried various work-arounds, all unsuccessfully.

But Democrats might succeed with their latest challenge. The Democrat-controlled legislature is passing a resolution calling for the legislature as an entity to sue the state for a court declaration that TABOR is a violation of the U.S. Constitution. The purported violation is that TABOR runs afoul of the Constitutional mandate that states be run by a “republican” form of government. That’s “republican” with a small “r.”

A “republican” form of government is one where the people elect representatives to pass laws, as distinguished from a direct “democracy” where the people themselves pass the laws. The Democrats contend that a system where people have the right to approve or disapprove tax increases by direct vote, is not a “republican” government, and therefore is in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Note the irony. The Democrats are suing on the grounds that the Constitution prohibits a democratic form of government and mandates instead a republican one.

Whatever the semantics, the Democrats have a lousy argument. But the fix is in.

You see, the plaintiff in this lawsuit will be the state legislature which, as mentioned, is controlled by Democrats. Fair enough.

But the defendant in the lawsuit will be the State of Colorado – which is also controlled by Democrats.  In fact, the attorneys who will represent the state in a purported “defense” of TABOR are the Colorado Attorney General’s Office. That office is an elected position, and is currently held by a declared Democrat who ran as one.

In short, to get TABOR thrown out, the Democrats are bringing a collusive political lawsuit against other Democrats. One set of Democrats sues a second set of Democrats, and the second set pretends to defend the suit. Wink-wink.

It gets worse. The federal district court in Colorado where this case would be heard is comprised of mainly Democrat appointees. Five of the seven active judges were appointed by Joe Biden.

The final insult is that the taxpayers will pay the legal fees for both sides of this farcical suit. Because the plaintiff legislature is a state entity, the state will pay for its lawyers. Because the defendant state is also obviously a state entity, the state will also pay for its lawyers. Although the Colorado Attorney General’s Office which will pretend to “defend” the lawsuit may not do so vigorously, it will certainly run up a healthy legal bill.

Last time this happened, the state spent over half a million dollars on lawyers, just for representing one side of the case. This time, the state will pay for the lawyers on both sides, and lawyer rates are higher now.

Welcome to Cali-rado.

The tariffs are a needed blow to the “progressive” tax system

Posted on by
1

Democrats think Americans pay too little in taxes. More specifically, they think “rich” Americans fail to pay their “fair share.”

They play fast and loose with those terms “rich” and “fair share.” Their unstated definition of “rich” is people who make more than the Democrat hurling the allegation. And they never do define “fair share.” It’s always just more, more, more on the rich, rich, rich.

Never mind that the top 1% of earners pay 40% of federal income taxes, the top 5% pay 61%, and the bottom 50% pay only 3%.

There’s another kind of tax in the news this week. President Trump announced tariffs on imported goods. The tariffs vary by country and by goods, but the broadest one is 10%. Some things are exempt from the new tariffs, and some things are subject to a higher one.

Democrats argue that these tariffs are, in effect, a sales tax on American consumers. The argument is that foreign manufacturers importing their wares into America will simply pass the tariff cost on to American consumers in the form of higher prices.

That’s approximately true but not entirely, for several reasons. For one, the foreign manufacturers will probably absorb some of the tariffs themselves by taking it out of their profit margins. To the extent that happens, the tariff is a tax alright, but it’s a tax levied on foreigners.

I like the idea of foreigners paying some of Americans’ taxes.

For another thing, Americans will probably shift their buying habits somewhat away from foreign goods once tariffs make them more expensive. It’s hard to predict how much of that will happen.

For simplicity, let’s assume what the Democrats and their media allies have assumed – the worst. Let’s assume that the quantity of imports does not decline, that this 10% winds up getting levied on all of them, and that the whole 10% gets passed on to American consumers.

What would that add up to in dollars?

America imports about $4 trillion worth of goods annually.  Therefore, under those assumptions, a 10% import tariff would cost Americans about $400 billion in higher prices.

The Democrats would have you believe that this $400 billion goes up in smoke. It does not. Like any other tax, it goes to the U.S. Treasury.

Even Democrats know this. (Well, maybe AOC doesn’t.) But they nonetheless rail against this particular tax, while supporting all other taxes.

I suspect that their real opposition is not to the tax, but to the taxer. The Democrat’s mantra is Orange Man Bad, and so everything he says and does is bad, even when he proposes something they usually love – a tax increase.

Now here’s an interesting connection. In Trump’s first administration eight years ago, the Republicans passed sweeping tax cuts. Tax cuts benefit the people who pay real taxes. Duh.

As pointed out above, the people who pay real taxes are largely the people who make real money. Double duh.

And so, the Trump tax cuts benefited real people who make real money and therefore pay real taxes. They didn’t much benefit people who don’t make money and therefore don’t pay taxes. Triple duh (and let’s get out the tiny violin).

Those Trump tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year. If that happens, the result will be a tax increase amounting to about $400 billion/year.

If that number sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same number mentioned above in connection with the tax revenue that will be realized by the new tariffs.

That’s right, the tariffs will approximately pay for extending the tax cuts. A coincidence? I think not.

There’s another twist. The people who will benefit from extending the tax cuts are not the same people who will pay the tariffs that offset the cost of them. The tariffs will be paid by everyone buying imported goods – people who buy Japanese cars, Korean electronics and South American vegetables. In short, they’ll be paid by pretty much everybody.

But extending the tax cuts will benefit people in proportion to how much they pay in taxes. The people who pay a lot of tax will get a lot of benefit. As pointed out, those are people who are wealthy.

An apt slogan might be, “To each according to what was taken from each.” Apologies to Karl Marx.

The end result is to chip away, a bit, at the progressiveness of the tax system – the system where wealthy people not only pay more because they make more, but also pay at a higher percentage.

That progressive tax system is how we got into an arrangement where the bottom 50% pay only 3% of federal income taxes while the top 1% pay 40%.

You may like this outcome, or not, depending on where you fall on the income spectrum.

But as a matter of social policy, it’s clear that our current progressive tax system leaves the bottom 50% as non-stake holders. Those non-stake holders naturally push for higher taxes because they know they themselves won’t have to pay them. They get to free load.

Democrats have pandered to those free loaders for a long time. That’s been successful for the Democrats, but destructive to the nation.

Should we kill all the alligators, or get out of the swamp?

Posted on by
2

Lawyer advising client engaged in expensive litigation: The goal should be to get out of the swamp, not to kill all the alligators.

Dishonest media-alligators undermined President Trump’s first Presidency with bogus charges of Russian collusion. Corrupt deep state-alligators fabricated allegations to defeat his re-election in 2020. Partisan prosecutor-alligators in New York and Georgia brought bogus charges in trying to derail his election last year.

Overreaching judge-alligators in some of the federal district courts now seek to undermine his national security policies – an area that the Constitution largely reserves to the President. 

It’s a testament to Trump’s courage and stamina – and to the nation’s structure and people – that he has fought and mostly beaten the alligators over the last ten years. In his spare time, he got himself elected President twice and survived two assassin-alligators.

He’s been up to his elbows in alligators. I understand why he’s going after them now. I probably would, too.

It’s also important to note, in fairness to Trump, that we didn’t elect him to get us out of the swamp; we elected him to drain it. Draining the swamp is inevitably hard on the alligators who feed there.

But here’s the issue. Not all of Trump’s targets today are alligators and not all are even in the swamp. 

Such as Big Law.

I don’t expect you to feel sorry for girly men and manly girls pulling down seven-figures to say res ipsa loquitur. And it’s a fact that Big Law (which I’ll define as the several dozen American law firms with over 1,000 lawyers) is a mostly liberal crowd. That is evident from their political contributions which are largely to Democrats, and from their pro bono activities which are mostly for liberal causes.

But you could say the same thing about nuns. (Not the seven-figures part.)

In my practice, seldom did I see Big Law behaving like a political institution. In fact, the firms that comprise Big Law are rivals which rarely act concertedly or even cooperatively. Rather, they make a good living by fighting with one another on behalf of their opposing clients.

Those clients are notably moderate, since the executive ranks of the Fortune 500 include very few radicals. In their choice of lawyers to represent them in their next billion-dollar merger or bet-the-company antitrust case, they aren’t exactly looking for Che Guevara.

As for individual lawyers, the recipe for success in Big Law has nothing to do with political leanings. The recipe is: do great work, have great clients, and bill great hours. (I had at least one of those ingredients when I was in Big Law, and wound up doing OK.)

Big Law is simply not an alligator, and, even if it is, it’s not in the D.C. swamp (with the possible exception of the firm that was involved in the Steele Dossier, an involvement from which the firm has distanced itself after the departure of a key lawyer).

Even if Big Law firms are indeed Democrat institutions, notwithstanding what I’ve pointed out above, being a Democrat merely makes a person hypocritical, socialistic, loathsome, and halitotic. It doesn’t make them a criminal.

So, is it appropriate to bring the enormity of the U.S. Government to bear on private enterprises like Big Law for the sin of choosing one political doctrine over another?

If so, then why limit it to Big Law? Why not have the government go after Big Business for their political leanings? Why not go after Big Billionaires for theirs? Why not go after Big You and Big Me for ours?

Why not go after Big Nuns?

Before you moan “damned straight!” consider the fact that someday there will be another Democrat President, someday there will be another Democrat Congress, and someday there will be another Democrat Supreme Court.

If America is to continue, it will be as a nation of predictable laws and sound principles, not a series of regimes exacting revenge on their predecessor regimes.

That said, I can hardly wait for Trump and Musk to bring down the teachers’ unions.

Glenn K. Beaton practiced law in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.